Minor differences
by Lady Amarra
Summary: John never wanted to be different, never wanted to be the one others turned to because of such a minor difference as a gene. MutantAU Inspired by xmen 3 BETAED
1. Chapter 1

**Notes**: This story came to me after watching X-men 3. You neither have to know

that movie nor anything about the comic, really; this is not a crossover and generally you

won't find them running around in leather (except for Ronon) or yellow spandex in this story.

**Warnings**: (language, blood, mention of rape and terrorism, not so

nice stuff)

**Rating**: R

**Disclaimer**: Nothing belongs to me, I just took them out to play a bit.

**ADDITIONAL WARNING**: There will be terrorism, torture and medical experiments in

this story. Nothing graphic, but better not start reading at all if this makes you uneasy.

_o-X-o_

**Minor differences **

by Amarra

_o-X-o_

John Sheppard was born in 1971 on an Air Force base near Atlanta, a bit skinny, small and quiet, but mostly healthy. He never screamed or whined, got named after his father and was proudly shown off as a good baby boy on every occasion.

His parents said they loved him and, given that his father wasn't on a mission somewhere in one war or another and his mother was sober for a change, that was almost true.

They hadn't discovered the gene yet.

_o-X-o_

I remember sitting in the mess, or what passed for it, in the middle of an Oriental desert.

The air was hotter than the coffee they served there and the sand was everywhere, between my teeth, in my hair, in my pants and even in the engines of the birds.

The others read their mail or listened to the radio chirping in the background, we had no

mission that day. I had nothing to do but cool my hands on a mug of coffee and hang

around waiting for an emergency, staring outside where my helicopter was standing; the

large net with all the yellowish and sand brown stripes and patches thrown over the pulled back rotor blades and all vents sealed for the upcoming sandstorm.

Flight engineers were cursing about the weather, sand and deserts while cleaning out

engine parts; others complained about their buddies on the carriers who got the easy

share of the whole war effort. I somehow understood them, kinda like doing the

MedEvacs instead of flying jets. Not that I couldn't have done that, I mean, I had the

chance to.

They said I could fly anything with wings, probably even charm things without wings into

the air if I wanted to, but I had this certain problem with orders. Always had that problem, so I never counted on making it past Captain, and I think even that might have been the pulling of strings by my old man.

I didn't care. I just wanted to fly, no matter what.

I didn't really listen to the radio on that day either, so I couldn't really understand what

the blank looks a couple of weeks later were about, not exactly. Or the jokes about being

one of 'them' as they called every single member of my unit for a medical check-up. It was normal to some point; after all, we were in a different part of the world with all kinds of parasites in the water and scorpions crawling around, and I really couldn't know what

they meant by 'them', which brings me back to the blank looks of my commanding officer

as he called me into his tent. It was shortly after the medical appointment.

I can still feel the cold in his eyes as he passed me the orders for transfer and snarled

something I didn't quite catch.

The stares of the others should have given me an idea about what was going on, but I

guess I was blind to it, as so often. I simply don't see some things coming.

I remained clueless as they put me through more tests as soon as I was back home, thought it was normal, and they really didn't say a thing. Not until that day a month after the first check-up as I sat in a room full of other guys, Marines, Navy, Army… all kinds of grunts and me in the middle. It pretty much looked like a classroom to me till the General walked in, waved the greetings off, sat down and started this interesting lecture about a certain gene that we all had in common.

A gene that shouldn't be there.

But we were lucky; as members of the military we would be allowed to help with

correcting nature's mistakes. I didn't like how it sounded.

I guess I could have called myself lucky that my father had made it up to a well known

General, so they allowed me one call before I got transferred to yet another desert, an

icy one this time.

_o-X-o_

It wasn't a jet today, just an old, red Ford Sierra, parked in the shadow of a crippled

tree, and the dark sunglasses low on his nose obscured his eyes in the dim evening light.

Johnny cash was singing about big bad Johnny and John smiled.

There wasn't much to look at or be stealthy about in the upcoming night, which might

have been why Lorne lay in the seat beside him as though on a Sunday trip to the beach - not that they had a beach where they usually lived.

"You know Sir, this is the best mission we've had in a while."

For some odd reason John was enjoying the mission too, more than all others before.

Lorne pulled his baseball cap lower on his face as an elderly couple walked past the car,

their dog sniffing at the back of the parked vehicle till the fat lady pulled him roughly

after her down the sidewalk.

John's father had always kept him on a short, short leash, and when old General John

Sheppard Senior had pulled on Junior's strings, no struggling had ever helped.

"Yeah, it is…"

_o-X-o_

"John." He wasn't sure his father's voice had ever sounded that cold before.

"I don't like this; I really don't like this Sir."

John looked out into the hangar, remembering his former base and the fact that he

wouldn't be the one flying this time.

"Please, General Sir."

The phone let him feel the ice perfectly, even all the miles from Washington to this

hangar at the edge of the eternal ice.

"You are my son, you will not ruin what I worked for."

"But…"

His father could have gotten him out of there, he knew.

"Go."

Just…

"Yes… Sir."

…he didn't.

_o-X-o_

It was like walking into a wall as the doors of the transport helicopter opened, its engines

still running because once they stopped they would freeze over. Everything was white,

cold and glowing, even the sky. I had seen a lot of places in the eight years I was in the

Force, but never such a remote, lonely place as this.

And I had spent months in the desert.

The Colonel leading the base knew the lecture about the gene as well as the General

back in the States had, spinning out the speech of the faithful servant of big mother America while frostbite gnawed at my skin.

For a change, I actually saw the trouble with this guy coming.

I followed the other men and grabbed my bag, marched out of the cold into my future

housings to get yet another appointment for a physical exam. Not the last one either.

_o-X-o_

John checked the notes they had about their target once more, comparing the picture on

his scanner with the guy driving his car up the lane. He didn't look like someone who

wanted to help with the destruction of a minority; he seemed rather to be part of one himself.

John would have bullied such guys in high school, if he hadn't been the outsider and new

guy all the time.

_o-X-o_

Sumner wore the white standard snow gear, warmly snuggled into the thick layers of cotton. The guy honestly wasn't freezing, opposite to the twenty guys before him..

"Attention gentlemen, I am Colonel Marshall Sumner, and it's my pleasure to welcome

you to Antarctica…"

Sumner grinned, having fun with this whole ordeal.

"It's cold, it's dark, it's lonely and it's my kingdom..."

The only thing missing was the evil laughter now, but that would probably come later.

_o-X-o_

With time one or the other guy vanished, some went strange or lost it; men who had

faced down more than one gun or near death situation. It got stranger with each day,

with each exam, with each test they took me through.

Two months and endless tests into the ordeal I met a girl. She wasn't the only female

on the base, there were a lot of nurses too, but this really was a girl. Perhaps seven or eight, merely a kid who clung to a worn out teddy bear and was led around by the same

doctors who had probed me in places I really don't want to talk about.

She sat opposite me that evening, shivering because of the paper scrubs they had put her in, holding onto the bear as if it were a lifeline, and I tried to distract her by making funny faces. She actually giggled, shyly at first but warming up a bit as the minutes passed.

"I'm John," I said and she smiled.

"Marna…"

Later, I heard her crying and whimpering for mercy behind the curtain.

I guess it was at that moment, in scrubs with a shaved head, sitting on a stretcher opposite a closed curtain, that the reality of this place and why I was here hit home.

I was special, yet nothing more than a rat in a laboratory. And I was not alone.

_o-X-o_

And there was the cat again, the little tabby bastard, tail high in the air and jaw set

almost as arrogantly as his owner's. The guy bowed down, collected the nasty little

creature into his arms and cooed at him lovingly, complete with funny faces and crooked

lips.

Lorne changed his position, all muscles tensing for the attack. John was just as ready but

didn't show it, which many people mistook for being laid back and calm, though in truth he just didn't alter his mask so they couldn't tell the difference. Something he had learned whilst being in the lab..

"There we have him…" The younger man grinned at his CO, looking so much younger

than he was in reality. It reminded John terribly of himself ten years ago.

"Yeah, there he is."

They left the car, the lane half dark and deserted now.

_o-X-o_

She was sniffling into the bear, goose bumps all over her skin and the blonde hair cut

short. His own had been shaved off for the last brain scan, which made his ears look

even funnier than they already did.

She whimpered as one of the nurses passed the door to the hall.

"Hey…"

He made faces, frowned, did that trick with his jaw that made his pointy ears wiggle. He

had a girlfriend once, Mary something, she had adored his elf ears.

She giggled.

"I'm John…".

She looked around as if telling a secret, leaned forward and grinned.

"Marna…"

Then Dr. Abrahams walked in and she didn't smile anymore.

_o-X-o_

They called it the ATA gene, the Abrahams Trans-sectoral Abnormality, after Sir Gordon

Abrahams who discovered it. He was a British doctor of medicine who, prior to his breakthrough, was famous rather for his doubtful testing methods than his knowledge or skills. He isolated the gene in a couple of test subjects, injected it into some mice and waited for the results.

The flying mouse he brought forward seemingly did the trick for the military.

A mess which ruined thousands of people from one simple moment of scientific glory –

and wasn't that just reason enough to hate every single kind of science?

_o-X-o_

They had an easy game this time, which might have been why there were just the two of

them. No Bates or Markham as their backup and no fast cars or planes waiting

somewhere hidden to whisk them off to their home base.

Lorne took the stairs at the back of the house, John the front door. The target wasn't

only arrogant, petty, self centred and annoying but terribly paranoid as well; still, he

barely owned a real lock for his doors, at least none which Lorne hadn't opened with one

wink of his left eye.

Literally.

Once inside, military training took over; secure the place room for room and find the target, silently, stealthily and with deadly accuracy. A target which lay face down on the bed in blue shorts and a brown t-shirt, muttering into the pillows about his idiot job and all the minions who couldn't tell A from B even if it bit them in the ass.

John grinned and almost snorted at the colourful description of how exactly McKay would

kick his minions' asses, till the cat hissed and pounced on Lorne's leg.

McKay started screaming like a bloody girl as the two men moved into action.

_o-X-o_

Total isolation should enhance him.

No sound, no feeling, nothing to do for the mind.

Sensory deprivation should bring out the true potential of the gene where no other test could show what he was capable of. But there really wasn't much to it, at least not for John. He could neither heal people like the little girl, nor could he read what other people thought or felt, like the nice blonde civilian woman, Kate Heightmeyer, who came with the last flight.

He was a just a guy who could fly anything remotely airplane like, it went as far as that.

_o-X-o_

Marcus Lorne was the youngest member of our merry band of lab rats; he wasn't even in the army or anything prior to his arrival here. They had kidnapped him from home, caught him with a secret test in school, but Sumner made sure to put him through a fine training regime just as he did with most civilian members of the base.

That was how the world was now.

They tested children at birth, kids at school and all people as soon as they needed medical help of any kind. The gene didn't occur that often, carried on the X chromosome and in most cases ineffective. Those who couldn't use it were lucky; those who had some strange thing going on which could be tied to the gene ended up somewhere where nobody asked questions.

Lorne's younger sister Hannah had it too, stronger even than his. She had had a double set of infected chromosomes, like they called it, something which made the females so much more important than the male gene carriers. He told me one night, as he vomited his guts out from a scanning contrast medium, that she had cut open her wrists and killed herself as it got out that she had the double gene.

She didn't want to live in a lab.

He was glad she had done what he had been too scared to do, was even ashamed of

being still alive. Luckily his parents were already dead; he wouldn't have been able to live

on knowing his mother and father were somewhere in a lab too, especially since he thought himself to be too much of a coward to do something about it.

I tried to tell him that it wasn't worth committing suicide just because we had a gene the

others didn't. They weren't the ones to judge what was right or wrong, and one day they

would realise that as well.

Three days later I got a call. Thanks to my father's connections again.

My mother had committed suicide as it got out that she had been the one who passed on the gene to me, shot herself in the head with my father's gun.

I somehow could not believe she would have done that of her own free will, even when

downright drunk out of her mind.

_o-X-o_

A hour or more had past already and Lorne still shivered and cramped. He threw up anything he had and even more, it hurt to just watch it.

"Take deep breaths and try to calm down a bit…" Sheppard tried to sooth him, leaning him back against the cold tile floor of the bathroom but it probably not helped much. The pain went deeper, it wasn't just the contrast medium they had made him drink.

"I should have done it…" He whimpered. "Just should have done it like Hannah did…"

"Hannah? She is your sister, isn't she?" John remembered that faded picture Lorne kept in a secret place under his bed, a brown haired, cute girl of not more than perhaps 14 or 15 years of age.

"She cut her wrists open…" He sobbed, too tired and too hurt to move much even although the cramps came back. "I should have done that too…"

He whimpered and threw up all over John's pants.

o-X-o

_(word count; 2.840)_


	2. Chapter 2

xox

The red Ford might have been the best solution where staying under the government

radar was concerned, but a crazy panicking physics expert wasn't exactly what it

was made for.

The trunk was out of commission there, and really, the guy looked like a baby-smooth couch potato but he could scream and deal punches if needed that had Sheppard really wishing he had called for backup. Some of Ronon's muscles would have been just the right thing.

"Sir…" Lorne had his hands full pressing the man down on the backseat again, lying on

him with all his weight until he calmed down. Damn the allergies against sedatives the

good doc had, damn them all.

"I know, I know…"

The wheels were screeching as they went around the next corner and onto the highway.

John hoped they wouldn't be found out before they reached home, it just wasn't worth it to be caught ever again.

_o-X-o_

"Captain John Sheppard?"

"Yes."

He was barefoot and the tiles were really, really cold beneath him, but the stare of Colonel Sumner behind the desk was worse.

"I regret to inform you that your mother died three days ago."

If possible the office around him grew even colder.

"She committed suicide with your father's service weapon."

He was freezing.

_o-X-o_

They reached their safe harbour four hours later; a deserted factory for chemicals of every possible kind, looming like a graveyard on the edge of the city. Markham, Bates and Collins, one of the civilian gene carriers, had put up a small camp there, hidden from radar or scanners due to the number of large steel containers lying all around.

McKay's kidnapping hadn't been mentioned once on the radio stations or the police

frequencies, nobody missed him yet. It was dark and kind of creepy in this place as the red car stopped and unloaded the still struggling man.

Bates and Markham came running as soon as they saw their CO and Lorne, taking over

the agitated scientist.

John stretched and yawned, looking into the sky. The glow wasn't the same as at home,

too artificial and cold. Funny, he smiled, this really was funny.

"Man, can't you stop struggling?"

_o-X-o_

There was this old man, George. I knew him from somewhere but couldn't really

remember from where. He was a nice man and talked a lot about his grandchildren,

Kayla and Tessa, sweet girls luckily without the gene.

When I asked what he did to come here, he just shrugged, and waved it off. He cared for Marna and they scientist let him, just so she would be calm when experimented with.

In the next months more and more people came, civilian and military, even scientists. I saw them in the halls of the med bay, or when the transport flights came. They were pretty much through with me so I mainly went back to being a guard and running when Sumner called.

It helped me to observe more and more of the structures and security details around the place.

Several civilians joined our already full sleeping arrangements in the large sixty man dorm, being lab rats like I was, Lorne was, even George and Marna.

I couldn't stop thinking about Marna from there on, and about the fact that I hadn't seen

her anywhere for days.

I knew there was a second dorm for the women on the other side of the complex, with several laboratories and rooms between us. I just hoped she was all right somewhere.

I knew she had the double gene and was probably one of those Abrahams really enjoyed toying with, I just hoped he wouldn't go too far. He had the tendency to do that far too often.

I knew that too.

I had to carry the corpses out of the laboratories, mostly with Markham and

Harris, two Marines on the same duty roster. There was no need to bury them outside; we only brought them to the small hangar where the snow mobiles and fuel barrels were kept. The other guards, Sumner's men, drove them out and disposed of them somewhere in the eternal cold.

_o-X-o_

He could live with being different; he had nothing but such people around him, men and

women who truly were special. People who somehow depended on him as their model for staying sane and not giving in. He just needed a bit of time to see this one coming.

Good people.

His people.

_o-X-o_

Bates had waved a gun into the general direction their new scientist and the man had finally calmed down, well, he fainted but that was as good as anything else. They bound McKay to a chair after they were sure he still breathed.

John watched the sun rise over the ghostly ruins around them, sitting high on a pile of debris and listening to the radio.

Bates was doing his rounds, Lorne was taking a nap, While Collins was doing calculations and Markham was off getting rid of the car and making sure the package was dropped off.

It was calm and peaceful, silent even. Moments like this gave John Sheppard all the peace he could ever possess; in such moments the mask slipped and his true self came through. It wasn't terrorism, it wasn't fighting, it was just him than.

The kid who had wanted nothing more than to fly, the boy who had dreamed about flying

while riding on a Ferris wheel, arms spread out and eyes closed. Yes, he could

remember that, his first memory ever; he could remember that and he grinned.

Not the man who bombed laboratories and kidnapped scientists.

McKay blinked the dizziness out of his vision, noticing the boundaries and the gag. He really wanted to start bitching about the absolutely brutal and disrespectful treatment, but terrorists would probably not listen to reason anyway. Nobody cared for his struggles or his growls, and really, why should terrorists care for anything… although, this man...

An ATA, an outcast, a terrorist, but somehow… he didn't look at all like someone who could kill 180 people in an impossible prison break. Skinny and with wild hair which was standing up in all directions, a mild smile on his lips while looking so young, this was surely no terrorist.

Birds broke the silence and took off into the air.

John looked over and noticed McKay was awake. His eyes hardened, and everything about him changed.

_o-X-o_

John had changed.

His father hated him, and he didn't care. He was the only one who stood up to Sumner. He was the one who ended up in the isolation tank and survived it without losing his mind. He was the one they all looked up to.

He was their hope.

Something he didn't want to be.

It scared him shitless to be the hero.

_o-X-o_

His vision was blurry and the tubes and wires all over his body hurt, inflaming every nerve and dulling them at the same time.

"I gave you an order Sheppard, an order…"

Sumner paced in the room before the water tank, the light bright and greenish from the

dancing figures ghosting over the walls, cast by the slowly rippling water.

"You can't be so dumb as not to listen to my orders…"

Sumner turned and stopped in front of the tank.

"My orders are your bible. I am your God, you bow when I say so, you pray to me when I

want you to and you die if I think your worthless little ass isn't worth the rations anymore…"

Not as though John had gotten anything to eat in the tank for the last five days or so.

"If I say kill, you kill..."

Sumner turned again, pointed his gun at George, who knelt on the ground behind him, and fired.

John didn't look away.

_o-X-o_

"Welcome back to the world of the living, Doc."

Sheppard swaggered over to the spot where McKay sat on his chair, the morning sun

bathing him in light. He really didn't resemble the classical terrorist at all.

"You gave me a little scare there, just fainting like that." He grinned and Rodney wanted to huff that he hadn't fainted, just past out from manly hunger… and fighting for his live, but the gag really took the edge of it.

"I hope you don't mind the gag, well, you got pretty loud there…" Sheppard shrugged his

shoulders and waved off the concerned looks of Bates as he bowed to eye level of the

scientist before him. "By the way, you've got a great punch for a scientist…"

Rodney struggled and cursed into his gag; of course he had been loud. He had been

kidnapped for crying out loud. His entire body ached and he was bound to a chair. To a

chair! He had delicate skin and really no need for bruises. And than this brute idiot had pointed a gun at him! Just like that! And he hadn't eaten yet too!

"Look Doc, let us make a deal. I take that gag out and we talk… No screaming, no

yowling and hitting…"

Sheppard grinned easily and McKay growled into his gag, then stilled. John smiled and

took the gag out, nodding shortly. "See…"

"What kind of terrorist are you huh? Are you really that dumb or are you faking it? Of course I screamed! I got fucking kidnapped for crying out loud… who wouldn't scream then? And really, I have delicate skin and God only knows….hmpph…"

The gag was back in place and Sheppard looked shocked, well, more amused actually.

"Or I talk and you just listen…" He was shaking his head.

Johnny Cash was yowling in the background again.

_o-X-o_

He had lost weight, bordering on starvation, but hadn't broken down like so many others;

perhaps this was his gene finally working. Giving him the power to carry on where others

would have lost it quite some time since.

He got back on duty no matter how he looked or felt and got called to drag a messed up experiment out of the complex again, a pretty messed up experiment.

Marna.

The little girl, blonde with big blue eyes and the healing powers.

Clumps of her brain and clumping blood coloured her hair strangely pink as he carried

her out into the ice like a bag of potatoes.

He drew the line there and never looked back.

_o-X-o_

She looked peaceful there on the bed, arms still wrapped limply about her worn out teddy.

"We are finished with her, get her out before she starts smelling…"

Abrahams sniffed arrogantly and left the room. John just stood there, cold and lonely,

pieces of Marna's brain dropping to the ground like the cloggy semolina pudding his

mother used to cook when he was a kid.

"Yes Sir."

_o-X-o_

McKay was amusing in his own way; the glare he sent John's way was worth a

lot of entertainment at least. The birds outside calmed down and Markham came strolling back in.

"The package is dropped Sir and I made sure nobody was home." He looked very tired,

exchanged a nod with Sheppard and went off to wake Lorne.

John stepped over to the radio and turned up the volume; if everything went right, the news would come at any moment. McKay watched every movement.

_o-X-o_

I couldn't, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't.

But the evidence was sticking to my hands, smeared all over them and never, never

leaving me alone again; they killed the kid like a lab rat, like the lab rats we all were, and I couldn't do a thing.

I couldn't do a thing.

"Sir, are you all right?" Lorne asked. He hadn't heard about the kid yet, had been in one of the laboratories this afternoon. He still had the bandage over the side of his bald head,

hiding the scars of an exam.

"No…" I answered.

I wasn't. Nobody was.

But that was probably exactly what would help to make it right again. I looked around in the sleeping area and communal room, finding several lost faces staring back at me.

Parish, the botanist Lorne had taken under his wing, could manipulate living things; they

forced him to test how far he could mutate mice with only the power of his gene.

Dr. Beckett, a doctor of medicine and a good soul, was capable of healing abilities quite

similar to what Marna had been able to do. They used him to create viruses.

Cadman, a blonde Air Force lieutenant and explosives expert, I had met in the med bay as they patched her up from some happy time with Sumner. She was good at

manipulating explosives by willpower.

They could all do things which other folk only dreamed about, or at least had nightmares about. Most of them however, didn't have those abilities before they came here, they were just normal human beings; still were, just different.

I wouldn't look back.

_o-X-o_

"You are Dr. Rodney McKay…" John was at eye level again, calm mask in place. "Physics

expert and head of the science department at the Stargate Foundation… You are working

on a nanite cure for the ATA gene…"

Rodney glared but gave a short nod; he was an important man, but not important

enough to tickle any money out of the Foundation, really not. The Foundation had been

set up by the government to help those carrying the ATA gene, to find a cure for them.

They wouldn't pay up to terrorists, with or without the gene.

"Contrary to what you might think, we are not terrorists, and we really don't care for your money… not at all." John sighed; he didn't need to be Kate Heightmeyer to read the

Doc's mind.

Rodney gave him a roll of his eyes and a look which might have meant anything between

'go on' and 'oh shut up'. John just stood up and continued, watching Lorne, Bates and

Markham pull out boxes and crates from a place to the side, while Collins started to pack up their equipment.

The radio broke off in the middle of a song for the rich voice of a man suddenly talking about an explosion at the Stargate Foundation laboratories. They suspected the famous terrorist organisation Atlantis to be the source of the bombing in which a parked red car was used to carry out the attack.

Rodney just stared.

"What we are doing here isn't terrorism, we are just trying to save ourselves…"

Somehow John felt as though he had to defend all this to McKay.

_o-X-o_

Abrahams had used Marna for one of the harder experiments, one of those which

should go totally against her nature; a nature that was wrong in the eyes of the

scientists.

The same scientists who found a gene, a single gene down in the almost never ending

coding of life, which shouldn't have been there. Or, rather, which they said should not have been there.

But who were they to judge what should be there or not? Well, he certainly knew that

nobody who tortured a girl of not quite seven years until her brain messed up the laboratory floor had any right to judge.

He wasn't sure he would be a better judge, but he could damn well try.

_o-X-o_

I had memorised every single shift and schedule down to the second. Aiden, a young

lieutenant in Sumner's group of merciless idiots, had agreed to help us - his grandfather had had the gene too before he got onto one of the help programs and vanished. He just

wanted to get out of there, just wanted to get away and never see the cruel things done

here again.

He brought Lorne and Bates to the armoury on the day the monthly supply flight was due. From there on, everything was just age-old instinct for those of us who were soldiers.

I made sure everyone knew, made sure they were ready. Kate Heightmeyer told them

with her great mind thingy, Lorne unlocked the cells and sleeping rooms, Carson and Biro

cared for those who were caught in experiments and I got rid of anyone who could have pointed a gun at us.

I didn't feel a thing.

_o-X-o_

Oh sure, saving yourselves. Rodney would have snorted if that wouldn't have made

breathing very difficult; they had just bombed four years of work to hell, the only good

thing was that they did it on a Sunday morning on which nobody was around. How stupid

were these terrorists to stage an attack on a Sunday? He huffed into his gag and coughed from the half snort.

John pulled the gag out and gave him the chance to breathe again.

"I know this might not sound like it, I do know that."

Sheppard winced at the colourful way the radio man laid out the pictures of the bombing

- Cadman had manufactured some fine stuff there, perhaps overdid it a bit though.

"But we have to do this. We have to make sure they don't kill any more of us…"

Marna flashed before his mind's eye, the last moment of George, Cadman as they

patched up the rape marks from Sumner. He opened his eyes and looked at a spot

beyond Rodney's receding hairline, far beyond the morning sun out on the gravel or the

birds playing there.

"By destroying my work and killing people!" Rodney snapped, still panting for air; the

gag hadn't been the cleanest one either and he really didn't want to think about what he'd just had in his mouth. "Oh yeah, that is so much not terrorism, so much."

"Nobody died. And your work? Well, Dr. McKay, that's the point… Your work itself may

have been a nice idea… but those guys you work for won't use it as a cure." John could

give as good a glare as the other man. "We are not the terrorists in this game…"

"Besides, we aren't sick," Collins supplied from his spot in the middle of the room.

Markham and Bates had finished moving the boxes and now helped to drag the equipment Collins had packed into the centre with the other stuff.

"I am not the one killing people! I would never do that!"

"You are pretty sure about yourself Mckay." Sheppard spit.

"Oh please. My work is totally harmless. It would detect the gene and deactivate it, simple and clean." He explained and stared at Sheppard like he would be too stupid to understand anything. "You would be a totally normal human being again…"

Sheppard's eyes narrowed down to slits, Mckay named himself a genius but couldn't see the obvious wrongness in his plan. "IF they keep your programming… ever though about what they could do with something that can detect the gene?"

_o-X-o_

(word count; 3.142)


	3. Chapter 3

_o-X-o_

He took down Abrahams first, shot him in the knee to hear him beg. It didn't help the man to beg for his live - it hadn't helped Marna either. He blew his brain all over the wall of the main office, just for Marna.

Most men without the gene were killed, others simply submitted to the rebellion. Ford, and a few of his comrades, helped to evacuate the rest of the people like they planned from the beginning.

John led an uprising, loaded anyone who could walk into the captured supply plane,

gathered enough guns and men to build a small army, and flew off.

They had no clue as to where.

But anything was better than dying at the hands of an insane scientist.

_o-X-o_

"This, this is your death Sheppard, they will kill you at first sight! Do you honestly think

you can get away with this? Do you honestly think you could pull such a stunt and get

away alive…?"

Sumner knelt on the floor yelling, his men already down. John left him alone in the room

with the corpses and went out into the hall, where Lt. Cadman and Lt. Ford waited.

"Cadman…"

John gave her the gun; she nodded and went into the room, closing the door behind her.

Nobody winced as she emptied the complete magazine.

_o-X-o_

"I am not an idiot; of course…"

"You may not kill us yourself,." Sheppard stood up again. "…but you are part of what is murdering innocents Dr. McKay, simply by engineering the parts for the weapons."

Da Vinci was a genius of his own time; if you looked at it that way, Rodney was pretty

much in the same position, but he had thought of that already, really, he wasn't an

idiot. And suddenly a lot of the changes the foundation had suggested made a lot more sense… agility, resistance against EMP… a backdoor for possible updates. Oh crap.

"Oh…"

"Yeah…" Sheppard knew he was working with bad methods there, knew that they

probably had a backup somewhere, but he also knew that the only person remotely capable of making anything as technologically advanced as those nanites was sitting right before him.

"So you're going to, uhm… kill me now? Because really, I am not keen on dying, really

not, not at all…" Because really, dying just wasn't what he had pictured for his life; a

Nobel prize perhaps, saving his sister, finding her a cure, getting old and grey with a cat

and a rocking chair on a porch.

_o-X-o_

The supply flight landed in the middle of a blizzard, engines still running and barely

catching the runway at all. Several of my newly liberated men and I stripped the dead

guards of their coats and boots and went out as though to do the usual meet and

greet.

The pilots weren't hard to silence and we didn't kill them, just gave them supplies and left them in the now dead base. I brought everyone able to walk into the airplane, and we carried those who couldn't walk; nobody was left behind as I took off.

I was back in my element as the engine mewled at my touch.

Bates sat beside me in the co-pilot's seat, Lorne standing behind me. We looked into the

blizzard buzzing outside and felt the aircraft move and shiver around us. We were free

but somehow, somehow it didn't feel as if it were the truth.

We had no clue where to go.

_o-X-o_

The radio reported no casualties from the bombing as Rodney came to the final

realisation that there probably wouldn't be a rocking chair on his porch, let alone a

house with a porch and white fence in the future. If there was a future for him at all.

"Look, I could forget it, how about that? I could forget the plans and the formulae, I am a

genius, I can play dumb…"

Rodney tried hard not to panic, but honestly, being held hostage by a bunch of terrorists,

being bound to a chair, and because he worked for the government; yeah, that was some reason to panic! And where were those damn government guys anyway, huh?

"It will be hard, because hey, genius here… but I swear I can play dumb."

Taking a Sunday walk through the fucking park?

Lorne moved over to where John stood, giving the Doc a strange look.

"Sir, we are ready… base says we are at sixty seconds."

"We won't kill you McKay, don't worry…"

John smiled.

_o-X-o_

They had been in the air for twenty minutes when the problems began, the engines were crackling and freezing in the cold air, even though they possessed special equipment for flying in the cold.

It was somehow ironic as they started sinking, ready for impact.

However, they never hit the ground.

_o-X-o_

"Sir, can you feel that?"

There was a whisper in the back of his mind, warm, soothing.

"Yes Lorne."

The whisper told of hope, told of safety, and John followed.

"Get the guys in the back ready for landing, we are going down…"

"Sir, with all due respect but there is nothing to land on…"

Bates' gene wasn't as strong as their own, he probably didn't notice the voice, but he

must have seen the snow open up below them.

_o-X-o_

God, I had never flown like this, never. The voice in my head was like a warm blanket

wrapping around me, soothing my nerves and telling me exactly where to go down.

"Sir, this is suicide…" Bates held onto his seat beside me and everything was shaking, the engine was frozen and we went down through thick clouds of dancing snow and cold wind.

There was practically zero visibility, only darkness and the strange glow of the snow, no real light. We went deeper and deeper and every alarm that damn airplane had was

ringing around me, the ground must have been directly below us.

Suddenly the voice got louder and the snow cleared. I could see the ground as it broke

away below us, leaving a shimmering transparent ocean and the voice.

_o-X-o_

"Don't worry? Don't worry? Do you think I am retarded or something?" McKay snapped and struggled again as Sheppard moved to get him off his chair and onto his legs. "Hey, ow… hey…"

"Just calm down… you will like where we're going."

"Oh sure…"

_o-X-o_

The landing was a rough one, gliding along the metal floor of what seemed to be a

runway till they finally stopped right at the base of a giant tower. One of many, many

towers which stood sparkling in a white glowing light before them, rising into a sky of ice

and silver.

Everything was silent then, nothing moved and nobody said a word.

Except for the voice in their genes which welcomed her children home.

_o-X-o_

McKay struggled and snapped as he was pulled over to the others at the centre of the

room. A moment later, a blinding white light appeared and vanished just as quickly.

He stood in a completely different room as he opened his eyes again, other people

moving forward to collect the boxes and bags which had been circled in the middle of the

room he was in just a moment ago.

He looked around with big eyes, foreign lights and architecture staring back.

"Wow…"

Sheppard just grinned.

"I told you we wouldn't kill you…"

No, they hadn't, and they wouldn't. Not anymore. No innocent people anyway. He watched McKay standing there beside him, blinking like a kid in a candy store, and smiled even more as the young woman they had rescued a couple of months back hurried down the stairs. If you hadn't seen the face she had made as she saw this place for the first time, you wouldn't have seen the similarities to the man now standing beside him.

"Rodney!" she called out, and wrapped herself around the still bound form of her brother.

"Jeannie?"

John grinned so hard his face hurt, at brother and sister united.

_o-X-o_

He wasn't sure exactly what his gene did; he could still fly anything better than most

others and heard his city talking to him louder than she did to anyone else.

That was all.

He didn't like what the others saw in him, never wanted to be a hero to begin with and

hated to be called a terrorist.

But sometimes you had to do things.

Things you didn't like.

And sometimes that was actually a good thing.

_o-X-o_

_(word count; 1430)_


	4. Chapter 4

_o-X-o_

Finding out about the qualities of the gene turned priority number one, shortly after the first gene carriers were found out. Abrahams himself had no gene but his adoptive son Daniel possessed it, even seemingly used it for his unbelievable talent to understand almost every language within mere days.

Abrahams had picked Daniel out of the mass of orphaned kids right because of this, and later, as he used his own adoptive son for experiments on which all his other gene theories based, he suddenly knew how right he had been from the start. Young Daniel, turned Dr. in linguistics and Archeaology before he died, and had a wonderfully strong gene which his foster father isolated and implanted into mice.

Of course Daniel never saw the poor little mice flying through the laboratory, or how thousands of people all over the world got tested and abused; he died in the aftermath of an experiment himself.

But that really was no problem at all. Abrahams found others, mostly in the militaries and prisons of the world, found others who he could bend and shape into helpers, to stupid to even know what they did for him until they already enabled him to kill thousands of innocents with one tiny red button.

History repeated itself.

_o-X-o_

Rodney still couldn't believe it. His sister! His sister Jeannie just like on the day he had seen her the last time, just so much happier, so much more healthier looking. He blinked at her, still not totally sure what was going on and she smiled back, looking over his shoulder and over to Sheppard next.

"Thank you, thank you, thank you!" She bounced up and down, left Rodney out of her clutches and did the same hugs and bounces for John. The man with the ruffled hair and the dark cloths kind of blushed, awkwardly patting her back as she literally wrapped herself around him to say thanks.

Of course Rodney didn't like that.

"Still bound here, would somebody get me untied here? Hello?"

John hoped the young woman was finished with hugging him soon, tried to hold back his blush and unease with being touched just long enough to find Mckay staring at him dangerously.

"Jeannie…" Mckay jumped on the spot. "Do you hear me? Your brother doesn't feel his hands anymore!"

"Oh stop complaining Mer…"

"Mer?" John blinked at the younger woman.

"Just a nickname…" Rodney snarled sharply and Jeannie giggled.

_o-X-o_

It looked like a modern city, like the skyline of New York or Singapur, just with less of the headache causing neon and more of an unreal silver glow, warm and welcoming like no big city of the modern world had ever been for me.

I think we stared at the city before us for a couple of minutes, our breath calming down and the adrenaline flowing away with the soothing whisper in out heads. The voice was caressing over my confused nerves, calming them, calming my shaking hands and my chest tightening fear from just moments ago.

We went to check it out after looking for the people in the back of the aircraft. 5 men and me went to investigate - the others secured the civil people and wounded, but it didn't really look like the city was dangerous.

She looked so beautiful with her high oceans of glass and bluish metal, up into the sky. 10 or 20 skyscraper high buildings centred around a even bigger central spire, more smaller buildings and smaller houses grouped around the bigger ones, there were even streets and squares between them.

We walked along the rim of the runway, past water which played at the base of the city, walked past high crystal buildings full of living, green plants and somewhere, somehow one of the doors opened for us.

It was warm and welcoming inside, as if the city had waited all the time just for us to return home.

A city resting below the eternal ice, waiting for her people to return home.

_o-X-o_

_Lorne held the P-90 in one hand and had the other flat on the glass before him, it looked a lot like a greenhouse of some sort. Warm and welcoming, alive and completely different from anything they had seen in years. _

"Sir, can this be real?"

_John shrugged. He stood face off a door and could swear It was offering him to open for him in his mind, like the voice of his mother, just not really. _

"It looks as if…"

_The door opened._

_o-X-o_

Jeannie dragged her brother up the broad stairs to the next level, along colourful windows to a door that lead out on a balcony. John watched and a small smile crawled over his lips, he could picture the wonder the other man probably felt right now, warm and soothing like the touch of a mother. He closed his eyes and let Atlantis wash over him, it was worth it.

Ronon walked down the stairs from the upper level, followed by the small form of one of the female civil scientists, Kusanagi. She had one of the Atlantis data pads clutched to her chest and smiled politely at her Co - the ever present protector at her side.

"Welcome back Sheppard-san…" She greeted him, Sheppard opened his eyes slowly and kept the smile in place. "We are still screening the news, but as it seems mission was a full success."

"Good to hear…" he drawled.

The downside of doing a bombing as this, necessary and doubtful as it was, was still the possibility to hit someone who wasn't meant to be hit. There after all, was one major difference between real terrorists and them; they wouldn't murder innocents.

They destroyed the weapons build to do that.

"Anything was calm while you were gone Sheppard," Ronon reported. "No activity on the surface…"

"That's good to hear too," Sheppard smiled and his look went back to the figures beyond the coloured glass on top of the stairs.

This mission had been a success, so far.

_o-X-o_

not an end, the beginning...


End file.
